CPS 08 Time

By Bycharlotte

Theme

Time

Method

For this week I did two separate works, the following are the methods:

1. Last year in Sydney, I discovered a cache of old film at Sydney College of the Art’s library that was going to be disposed of. The collection was called Patterns in Motion. As I leafed through the photographs, I was struck by several portraits.  I scanned the portraits and used Photoshop to manipulate them.
2. I placed my polaroid camera underneath a window that is on the ceiling of my house and exposed the film every 15 minutes for an hour.

Context

In his book Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes writes about time and photography:

For me the noise of Time is not sad: I love bells, clocks, watches — and I recall that at first photographic implements were related to techniques of cabinetmaking and the machinery of precision: cameras, in short, were clocks for seeing.
​-- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

Bathers ideas about time regarding photography are very interesting. I also looked at Tony Conrad’s work, he consistently questions our relationship to time through, his experimental work 'Yellow Movie 2/28/73' is a great example. In this work, he painted a piece of paper with emulsion and let the film takes its own course of time the work challenges to the notion of duration.

https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/220/2854

Response

According to John Szarkowski’s photography is, in part, a time based medium and yet its relationship to time is fraught and complex. I gathered working with photographs can be a good way to respond to the theme of time. For my first response I was thinking of manipulating captured time and somehow visually representing that manipulation, so I stretched the film with photoshop to show the stretched captured time.

For the second response, I simply wanted to experiment with the idea of duration and its relationship to the film and photograph.